As a follow-up to the post on Philip Collins’ article on British lecturers in America, G. K. Chesterton has a satirical passage on the undiscriminating enthusiasm of Americans for attending lectures in a Father Brown story, “The Curse of the Golden Cross,” in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). Father Brown, sailing home to Britain from America, is seated at a table with five others, including two
English lecturers returning from an American tour. One of them was described as Leonard Smyth, apparently a minor poet, but something of a major journalist; long-headed, long-haired, perfectly dressed, and perfectly capable of looking after himself. The other was a rather comic contrast, being short and broad, with a black, walrus moustache, and as taciturn as the other was talkative. But as he had been both charged with robbing and praised for rescuing a Roumanian Princess threatened by a jaguar in his travelling menagerie, and had thus figured in a fashionable case, it was naturally felt that his views on God, progress, his own early life, and the future of Anglo-American relations would be of great interest and value to the inhabitants of Minneapolis and Omaha.
Posted by Jason 
